Blue and Gray Still in Conflict at a Battle Site in Florida

OLUSTEE,
Fla. — There is an old saying in this state of seesawing sensibilities:
The farther north you go, the farther south you get.

Florida’s
northern counties have long seen the South as a kindred place — one
that breaks the same biscuits, hunts the same deer and shares the same
political bent. So around this tiny town 45 miles west of Jacksonville,
on the edge of Florida’s largest and bloodiest Civil War battlefield, a
Union incursion on sacred ground feels, to some, like reopening
150-year-old wounds.

“Old
grudges die hard,” said John W. Adams, a former division commander in
Florida for the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “And feelings run deep.”

Last
year, nearly a century and a half after the Battle of Olustee, the
Florida chapter of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War made a
request to the state parks department. It asked for permission to place
an obelisk to honor Union soldiers (who lost the battle on Feb. 20,
1864) inside the three-acre Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park, the same patch of land that holds three monuments commemorating Confederate soldiers....